Squeals of “Yuck” greeted our journalists as they returned triumphantly with a Coke bottle filled with clean drinking water. Inside the bottle was a thin, worm-like creature. It truly resembled an animated human hair.
The worm, possibly a horse hair worm (part of the round worm family), is considered to be a parasite.
This identification is purely based on Google and is not to be considered an expert opinion.

Trust us, we tried to get expert opinion, but getting uThukela to answer a simple “What is this?” type of question is a lot harder than you may think.
Firstly, our initial enquiry via the uThukela communications office failed to get an answer. This was followed by a few telephone calls, all of which resulted in uThukela closing ranks. The next thing I know is that I am being telephoned by the mayor of uThukela no less, who informed me that the only way they could answer was for us to…

We will give you 10 guesses…
Was your first guess to contact the communications office of uThukela? Yes, something we had already done, bravo!
So, we had effectively gone full circle without getting an answer. Even our offer of “Just get your lab people to come and collect it” seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
So, it sits in a Coke bottle on my desk, wriggling away and daring me to drink from the bottle. Now, if it’s a horse hair worm, then it is perfectly harmless… But I am not going to bet my life on Google – fortunately I have a choice. Sadly, thousands of water consumers do not have this choice and could easily have swallowed the slippery worm without knowing it.

Is it dangerous? Is it responsible for the stomach bug that has hit our town? I doubt it, but until someone at uThukela decides to act, we will never know…

Original story: HERE